[Yum] Bleeding edge avoidence

[Panu Matilainen]

On Fri, 1 Sep 2006, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-09-01 at 01:06, Panu Matilainen wrote:
>>> Is there documentation available for the various plugins and how
>>> to use them together?  For example, given a tested system, how
>>> would you tell a box in a different location to update/install
>>> to the same packages and versions?
>>
>> You can set the versionlock file to be somewhere remote, eg
>> locklist=http://my.main.server.com/versionlock/distro/$releasever or
>> similar. Then you just control that one file, all yum update/install
>> operations will use the versions specified there no matter what other
>> versions are available.
>
> I hate to sound dense, but I don't see how that follows the
> tested system.  Can you give a complete example or point to
> more detailed documentation?  The scenario is that one machine
> is used for testing and once it is approved, the same set
> of packages should be updated on a group of remote machines
> in different locations.  However, one or a few RPM packages will
> be local system config files that are tied to the machine
> location and should not be identical everywhere.

On that testing box, once a given pkgset is approved, you generate the 
versionlock list with something like 'rpm -qa > versionlock.list', edit if 
necessary (eg to allow for those per-machine differences) it to the 
published location all clients look at. That's how it basically goes.

>>> Also, now that the download-only option has been moved out of yum
>>> itself, how do you tell it to pre-fetch the packages you are going to
>>> need (either for this or a normal 'update'), so as to be able to plan
>>> the timing of the actual package installation/updates in a way not tied
>>> to internet bandwidth or health of remote repositories?
>>
>> One way to do "download only" with current yum itself is to set
>> tsflags=test in yum.conf, that way it'll just perform a transaction test
>> but not actually do anything to the system. Or you can write a five-line
>> plugin to make it stop once download completes.
>
> Again, how is someone supposed to know how to do this?  Do you
> now have to know python to interact with yum beyond the default
> 'I hope the repository is OK' mode?

As was pointed out by Seth, such a plugin has been already written while I 
wasn't looking :)

 	- Panu -